External Resources

One of the ways Flare supports team collaboration is that you can create mappings to external resources. The External Resources window pane lets you select and maintain groups of external files that you want to share among Flare projects. The paths of these files are written to the registry so they will be available for all your Flare projects.

External resources can be virtually any local or network files to which you have access (e.g., images, PDF files, Flare project files). From the External Resources window pane, you can easily bring external files into a project (i.e., a copy of the file is added to your Flare project) and keep them synchronized with the source files through mappings.

The external resources feature is ideal for shared files that you expect to change over time (e.g., logo images, PDFs, stylesheets), as opposed to, say, a template file that is simply copied into your project and changed only in that project.

Example You have a PDF containing employee contact information, and the main copy of this PDF resides somewhere on a network drive. You need to include this PDF in one of your Flare projects and link to it from a table of contents (TOC). But the PDF changes periodically, and you need to make sure you always have the latest data.

Perhaps the easiest way to accomplish this is to first add the folder containing the PDF to your External Resources window pane.

Next, you can right-click on the file and bring a copy of it into the Flare project you have open.

Now the copy of the PDF is in your project and you can include a link to it from a TOC.

A couple of months later, you need to generate new output from the project. So in the External Resources window pane you click the button to synchronize any changed files.

And now the project contains the latest changes to the PDF file.